Soccer Men (20 page)

“I think I had good relations with Kevin Keegan [who coached Anelka at Manchester City]. It was very easy for him to teach me things in training because he used to play soccer, he used to be one of the best, and he used
to play up front like me, so I always had a great time with him.” This may be the first instance in recorded history that anyone has claimed to have learned more from Keegan than from Wenger.

We return to the wardrobe, where the dresser and a couple of minders fuss over the half-naked Anelka in English and French: “That looks really good.” “Rapper style.” “Hanging off.” “Too short.” They’re slim fits.” Anelka is concentrating so hard on the clothes that he cannot answer any questions until we exit the wardrobe area.

“I think you learn confidence on the pitch. When you first start, you don’t know anything about playing soccer. Ten years later, because you’ve played so many games, you know what to do and how to do it. You are not afraid anymore to try things, not like when you used to be very young. I think it’s special, because only people who have played soccer can speak about it. Even if I tried to speak about it, it’s difficult to make people understand. You need to trust you, more than anything, because if you don’t have confidence in you on the pitch, even if you are the best player in the world, you won’t do anything.”

“Sometimes it’s difficult because you know sometimes you will have a bad game. You are not confident every game.”

On Anelka’s first day at Real Madrid, as he tells it, nobody bothered to introduce him to anyone in the locker room. It wasn’t a great start. He says that Samuel Eto’o and Geremi—fellow black young Francophones—had a friendly word with him, to say, “Watch out. Some senior players have already gone to the president to ask why you’ve been signed when Fernando Morientes is already here.”

It ended up being quite a season. That March of 2000, Anelka boycotted a practice to protest how Real’s coach Vicente del Bosque was using him. Everyone said his older brothers—who managed him as the only product of the family business—had put him up to it. The consensus in the British media was that Anelka was “mad.” They rechristened him “Le Sulk.” Real, already fed up with the expensive kid, gave him a forty-five-day ban. It became the most Anelka-esque episode of Anelka’s career.

I went to Madrid during the ban to have a look. Anelka was celebrating his twenty-first birthday. He played golf and tennis, hung out with his brothers and the neighborhood pets, went to Real for punishment training, but was sent home for not calling in advance, and then served birthday cake and Coca-Cola to the hordes of journalists waiting outside his house.

A club spokesman had told the journalists, “If we had known all this before, we wouldn’t have signed him. To have done otherwise would be masochistic.” Del Bosque said: “This is not a school.”

In fact, Real, like most soccer teams, was rather like an old-fashioned British boarding school. You could see this even as Madrid took the field in a Champions League game against Dynamo Kiev while Anelka was spending another evening at home.

The team was led onto the pitch by the trio of Raul, Fernando Hierro, and Fernando Redondo. Raul (good at games) was the most popular boy in the class. Hierro was the school captain: He had been around forever, was challenged by no one, and so had become a bit of a bully. Redondo was their pal. Roberto Carlos, Steve McManaman, and Fernando Morientes tagged along, good enough and sociable enough to have gained acceptance. But Anelka, as so often in soccer, was the strange, quiet boy who got bullied.

As Henry says, “In soccer they never stop telling you that you’re nothing without the others. But in fact you’re always by yourself. Nico has understood that.”

Eventually, Anelka decided to try to block out the negative in Madrid and concentrate on the positive. That season Real had two teams: a weak one in the league and an unbeatable one in the Champions League. In the final in Paris, with Anelka in the side, Madrid hammered Valencia 3–0. As a photographer instructs him to smile, he recalls, “I think it’s something special when you play a final in France, in Paris. How do you say? Good memory.” Is there a moment he remembers in particular? “When you take the trophy.”

A few weeks later, at Euro 2000, Anelka became a European champion with France too, though he didn’t play in the final against Italy. At only twenty-one, he had already won almost everything. But in the eight years since, he has added just one more prize: a Turkish league title with Fenerbahce. Imagine what Anelka’s career might have been like if he had stayed
with Wenger, or had turned up to practice at Real. But after that season he had to get out of Madrid. Anelka had played for two big clubs, and left both in bad odor. After that, he would barely get another chance in topflight soccer.

“It was very difficult, but people don’t think about it. I think they don’t want to think about it. They just want to see someone’s success. But it’s difficult when you’re playing in big clubs and you are very young. You never know what’s happening inside the club, or inside your life. And they expect you to be good all the time. It’s hard to be good all the time. I don’t think people realize: It’s a nice game, it’s nice to watch, but”—and for once Anelka laughs—“it’s not an easy game.”

The incomprehension of outsiders is perhaps the dominant theme of Anelka’s conversation.

Paris St. Germain paid Real $30.2 million to bring the local boy home. The aim was to build a team around Anelka for the black and brown kids from the
banlieues
who populated the Auteuil end of the stadium (not so much for the Boulogne end, who are chiefly white skinheads).

PSG’s president when Anelka joined was Laurent Perpère. He told me that Anelka didn’t speak. “You never knew what he wanted,” said Perpère. He remarked that in this the player strangely resembled Ronaldinho, who joined PSG in 2002 and also failed there. “He always smiled, but you never knew what he wanted. He was always in another world.”

PSG’s coach, Luis Fernandez, didn’t hold with kids being stars. Perpère explains, “He thought there should be only one star in Paris, and that was Luis Fernandez.” In the end, Fernandez and Anelka got involved in some sort of fisticuffs at a training session in October 2001. Anelka said, “Luis comes from the
banlieue
, like me. So we’re used to shouting matches. We always reconcile afterwards.” But PSG quickly loaned Anelka to Liverpool. He would have liked to stay there, and Steven Gerrard was a great admirer, but Liverpool wouldn’t keep him. And so the parade continued, through Manchester City, Fenerbahce, Bolton, and now Chelsea.

“I think I was happy everywhere I played. There was no regret.”

“I think it was more about my character than my football,” says Anelka, as we trek back from photo shoot to wardrobe yet again. “A lot of people were speaking about me, but not on the football pitch, maybe outside. That’s why some of the doors was closed. But I kept working.” It annoyed people, he has said, to see a twenty-three-year-old driving a Ferrari. The critics forget the sacrifices he had made, leaving home as a child to join the academy in Clairefontaine where the boys were told that only four of the twenty-two of them would make it. “And at the start, I wasn’t one of those four.”

“I think it suits soccer, because if I didn’t have any personality, I wouldn’t be here today and play for the big clubs. So—maybe it was too strong.” Anelka allows himself a smile.

“There’s something special about them because they’re very good at what they’re doing, and at the same they do what they want. They have extreme personality. I play football, and I try to be myself. But people say I have a strong personality. I don’t say anything. People say that. I have the luck to have—not the same personality, but a strong personality. They are a great example for me.”

The second theme of Anelka’s conversation is beginning to emerge: Life is a morality play in which he is in the right. Anelka is one of the few northern European players (as opposed to Brazilians or Africans) with faith. While at Arsenal, he converted to Islam. Later he changed his name to Abdul-Salam Bilal. His faith was a reason he later chose to play in Turkey. Other leading players, including Franck Ribéry and Robin van Persie, who both married Muslim women, are also among the few European converts to Islam.

Within the game, the austere religion is a sort of antidote to locker-room lad culture. In British locker rooms in particular, the ultimate term of praise for a teammate is
one of the lads
. You get to be one of the lads through shopping, drinking, and sex, whenever possible in the company of other lads. Islam appeals to the likes of Van Persie, who need to be saved from laddism. But Anelka has no gift for lad culture, because he is not clubby, anything
but “one of the lads.” His only laddish aspect is his dress. Islam is his shield from having to pretend to be a lad.

His social problems cost him on the French team as well. The future Ronaldo missed a total of four years of international soccer because of rows with France’s coaches and his own walkouts. He didn’t want to play for Roger Lemerre, because whereas Lemerre addressed all the other players with the familiar
tu
, he sometimes used the more formal
vous
with Anelka. Later he once refused to show up for Jacques Santini. “Santini,” reveals Anelka between wardrobe changes, “is not a good manager anyway.”

Raymond Domenech wouldn’t take him to the World Cup of 2006, even though Lilian Thuram went to try to talk the coach into it, bringing a mute Zinedine Zidane with him to add weight to his argument. Domenech picked Djibril Cissé instead, who isn’t even a poor man’s Anelka. Even when Cissé broke his leg just before the World Cup, Domenech still wouldn’t pick Anelka. Anelka says that when he’s with the French squad nowadays, he watches and speaks only when appropriate. You might almost think he had a difficult relationship with his own country. His two famous brothers have emigrated: One stayed on in Madrid, and the other runs a bar on Miami Beach.

“I have already my flat in Paris. Of course I will come back to Paris because it’s my city, and France is my country.”

Thierry Henry obsessively watches soccer on television, even games in the French second division. Anelka once said he never watches soccer.

“Sometimes, when I have the chance to watch. If I have to choose I won’t watch any games, because, errr, I do it every day. Soccer is a beautiful game, but it’s also work that I have to do every day. It’s not like when you are kids and you play soccer just like a hobby. When I’m off the pitch, I try to think about something else.”

“No. Even in difficult time, I had people around me, and my family, and even in difficult time we were happy, because when you know you didn’t do anything, nothing can happen to you because you are not as bad as people try to make people believe. And when you believe in God, you know the reverse will come, because you didn’t do anything wrong.”

In interviews Anelka often asserts his own happiness, perhaps to show that the world can’t touch him.

At twenty-nine, he is now late-phase Anelka. The next two or three years are the most crucial of his career. They can turn him into more than just a story of “what might have been.” This January, nearly six years after he left Liverpool, he finally returned to a big club: Chelsea, which paid $30 million to bring him from Bolton. Avram Grant, the club’s manager, admitted, “He had a bad reputation ten years ago, but I could say the same about any one of us.”

Do you know the significance of the figure of £85 million?
(It’s the total amount that has now been paid for him in transfer fees, spread over nine transfers, more than for any other player ever.)

“Yeah.”

“No. I don’t care about records, because first of all I don’t look at the money they spend on me. If you want to look at the money, it’s people outside.”

“Work. I had a lot of—how do you say?—difficult times, but even in difficult times I kept my head . . .” He tilts his head upward. “How do you say? Up? And I think I’m happy about where I am today and what I did.”

“When people try to make story about my character and everything. When people try to say things about me that was wrong. It was difficult, when you know you didn’t do anything.”

“I think so, because I played in the beginning of my career in big clubs, and I knew I have the quality to play in the big clubs. I stayed focused. I wanted to come back in a big club. And I did it. Now I’m twenty-nine. I don’t need to move again. Because I have a club who can give me Champions League; it can give me a title every year.”

He knows that this is his last chance. Nobody doubts his gifts. However, he has gone through seven thin years, and his scoring record lags the best. Anelka averages one goal every three league games over his career and one every four games for France. Peers like Michael Owen and Thierry Henry average one goal every two league games, and Ruud van Nistelrooy does
better. Admittedly, Anelka has played for worse clubs than they did, but that is part of his problem.